The Caixin-Sinica Business Brief, episode 48

Kaiser KuoMay 21, 2018Comments Off on The Caixin-Sinica Business Brief, episode 48

Welcome to the 48th installment of the Caixin-Sinica Business Brief, a weekly podcast that brings you the most important business stories of the week from China’s top source for business and financial news. Produced by Kaiser Kuo of our Sinica Podcast, it features a business news roundup, plus conversations with Caixin reporters and editors.

This week:

We note social networking giant Twitter’s first-ever client event in China to expand its footprint in the country.

We learn that a resurgent and refocused Baidu was the big winner among China’s top internet companies in the first quarter of the year, while an overinflated Weibo moved to the bottom of investors’ lists as its red-hot growth showed signs of cooling.

We hear that after Baidu’s COO, Qi Lu 陆奇, announced he would step down due to personal and family reasons, the company’s stock price plummeted.

We explore a new report that found that around 62 percent of Chinese use ride-hailing platforms, compared with 23 percent in the U.S. and 29 percent in Germany.

We discuss the news that Li Ning 李宁, an education official seen tucking into an endangered animal in viral photos last year, has been sentenced to 10 years in prison for unrelated corruption charges.

We find out that Chinese top judicial authorities have raised the amount of compensation given to people who are wrongfully imprisoned, but the amount still falls short of what legal experts argue is adequate.

In addition, we talk with Fran Wang, economics reporter with Caixin Global, about Beijing’s ongoing push to regulate wealth management products. We also have a conversation with Doug Young, managing editor of Caixin Global, about the latest with Chinese multinational technology company Lenovo and hotpot chain Haidilao.

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Blaming China

This week on the Sinica Podcast, Jeremy and Kaiser are joined by Benjamin Shobert, who visited the Sinica South studio in Durham, North Carolina, for this episode. He is a senior manager at Healthcare NExT, a healthcare initiative of Microsoft, and leads strategy with national governments. The topic of discussion is his compelling book, Blaming China: It Might Feel Good but It Won’t Fix America’s Economy. The three discuss the taxonomy of dragon slayers and panda huggers, and some realities with which the world is now grappling: the rise of China, outcomes of globalization, the watershed moment of the 2016 U.S. presidential election, and the impact it has had — and will continue to have — on the bilateral relationship between the United States and China.

Photo of the Day

A worker waters the flowers and plants in front of the local government building in Qingdao, Shandong Province, on the October 1 National Day. In the background, the Chinese propaganda characters can be translated as “[Xi Jinping] Thought on Socialism With Chinese Characteristics for a New Era” and “Striving for the Great Rejuvenation of the Chinese Dream.”